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8
I have searched the records thoroughly and find neither snapshots nor 8-mm movies of this trip, which seems strange, but I am virtually positive that we took the trip in 1937. Maybe we just never saw anything worthy of photographing. Babbie went to Cape Cod last year with friends and taking Peg. They both loved it and I gather that in these many intervening years, the Cape has been spruced up a great deal. For us, however, it was the site of a lost vacation in 1937. (Cont. on p.9)
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There were probably two major reasons why I gave up my diary completely in 1937. First I was getting busier and busier at the office and doing a good deal of traveling. Second, I was still struggling to write saleable fiction. From 1932 to 1939 inclusive, I produced 13 manuscripts which I thought were saleable to the extent that I sent them to various magazines. They totaled about 50,000 words. There were two articles and eleven short stories. None of this material was accepted by anyone and with one or two weak exceptions, no one even expressed mild interest in any of it. I spent some of my scarce and hard-earned money, moreover, to get some help from the critic and teacher, Thomas H. Uzzell, and studied his textbook, "Narrative Technique," carefully, doing the exercise assignments quite religiously. It was only a year or so ago that I finally threw this latter material into the trash barrel. For, in the 1930s, although I thought I was working hard at this writing project, I wasn't and I wasn't really making enough progress to justify the time I was putting into it. In 1937, I wrote the first two of three short stories based on railroad material. They had the following titles:
DEATH IN THE BACK CAB
and
SHORT CIRCUIT
The first was a detective story, the first and only one I ever produced. The second was supposed to be amusing. I sent both of them to Freeman Hubbard, the editor of RAILROAD MAGAZINE, but Freeman wasn't captivated by either one of them and returned them with printed rejection slips. The market for railroad material was pretty limited and I'm not sure who else I sent them to but they were promptly returned. I never took rejections gracefully and found I wasn't the type to write on and on, to accumulate a vast pile of rejections without becoming discouraged. So my output was minimal at best. During this same period, however, I produced and had published, many technical articles on locomotive design and application. In fact, I got paid $45 once for such an article, something quite unusual. However, all my literary efforts were abject failures.
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